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2 Great WordPress Plugins to Find Your Blog Most Powerful Pages

cgseo — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 13:30:31 +0000

Learning which of your published content did particularly well based on some parameters is a great way to become a more successful blogger. This way you can see which of your posts are well received in social media, which of them get linked more and which of them spur a more active discussion. This week I am sharing the two best WordPress plugins that will offer you a huge variety of parameters to evaluate your posts: Blog Link & Traffic Analysis Plugin for WordPress This plugin digs into your blog posts and offers several variables to find the most powerful of them: post date page views per post in the previous 3 months inbound links (requires Yahoo Site Explorer Yahoo API which is quite easy to receive) Google bot visits (last visit and number of visits) Yahoo bot visits (last visit and number of visits) MSN bot visits (last visit and number of visits) Other bot visits You can sort by any of the column to find the pages that did best for any of the criteria. For example, if you want to find post with most backlinks, click > icon in the “Inbound Links” column: The best part of this plugin is that it gives you the ability to compare any of the variables side by side. For example, you can see how number of links effects the bot visits and traffic: Just a quick note: you will need to update the link count manually and the process takes quite some time, so you don’t want to do that too often. Popularity Contest for WordPress This plugin provides a wealth of information on how well your posts are doing. 1. The summarized popularity data: The first thing you’ll see is the table containing the following data: Post unique views; Category and archive views, Comments, Trackbacks, etc (I wish the table were sortable though) 2. Recently popular pages : the section allows to see most popular posts over the past 30, 60 and 90 days as well over the past year. 3. Most viewed pages and categories : Most viewed pages; Most viewed categories; Most viewed tags; Most viewed archives; Home page views; Feed views; 4. Reactions: Most commented posts; Posts with most trackbacks; Posts with most pingbacks; 5. Averages: Average popularity by category; Average popularity by tag; Average popularity by month. 6. Popular posts within each category. The plugin also offers a handy sidebar widget that allows to list your blog most popular posts by plenty of parameters including overall popularity, archive views, comments, etc: The widget also has quite a few options that allow to exclude views by authors, (dis)able showing the popularity rank of the posts, set the search engines, adjust the popularity values, etc: Notes: The plugin gave me an error on installation but when I left the installation screen it appeared to be working just fine; After installation you will notice that new posts are much more popular than old ones. Since home and feed views have not been recorded for old posts, they won’t be ranked as highly as new posts. Any other suitable plugins I have missed? Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . 2 Great WordPress Plugins to Find Your Blog Most Powerful

NSFW: Facebook, YouTube Are the Most Visited Sites at Work

cgseo — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 20:19:58 +0000

If you visit Facebook or YouTube during official hours while in the your offices, well – welcome to the club. I do that too. And guess what? It looks like everyone else are doing the same thing as study shows that both Facebook and YouTube are getting heaps of traffic from business sites. SC Magazine UK is reporting that according to the study made by Network Box, 6.8% of business internet traffic now goes to Facebook. Google sites grabs around 3.4% of all traffic, Yimg (Yahoo’s image server) gets 2.8%, Yahoo 2.4% and DoubleClick 1.7%. These are based on the analysis of 13 billion URLs used by businesses in Q1 2010. Online video consumption in the workplace is also eating up business bandwith according to the report. YouTube videos is using up 10% of all corporate bandwidth, followed by Facebook taking 4.5% of all bandwidth used. Windows update, Yimg and Google follow with 3.3%, 2.7% and 2.5% respectively. Network Box internet security analyst said that the findings of their study clearly show that IT administrators have more reason to be concern about the amount of social network use in the workplace. ” There are two real concerns here: firstly that employees will be downloading applications from social networks and putting security at risk; and secondly the amount of corporate bandwidth that appears to be being used for non-corporate activity,” said Herron. So, if you’re one of us who consistently check Facebook and YouTube while in the office – hope that our bosses won’t read this news. Or if they do and they decide to ban Facebook and YouTube in the workplace, we can always argue that we’re visiting Facebook for “business networking” purposes and YouTube for the sake of occupational learning . Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . NSFW: Facebook, YouTube Are the Most Visited Sites at

Google Officially Counts Site Speed for Web Search Ranking

cgseo — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 21:26:41 +0000

Google has just officially announced that website speed is now a new signal when it considers web search ranking. Although not too much weight is given to site speed, still Google encourages website owners to consider implementing site speed booster to make their websites rank higher on Google search. This however applies only to Google.com. And site speed is defined by Google as the speed by which websites responde to web requests. Google also gave two major reasons why site speed is important – it improves user experience and satisfaction when visiting websites and it reduces operating costs. In determining site speed of a websites it ranks, Google uses various methods and sources. What are those specifically remains secret though. To evaluate the speed of your site, you can use the following tools, as suggested by the Google Webmaster Central Blog : Page Speed , an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement. YSlow , a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed. WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist. In Webmaster Tools , Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We’ve also blogged about site performance . Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Google Officially Counts Site Speed for Web Search

Yahoo Searches Gain 3% of Market Share

cgseo — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 07:33:47 +0000

Hitwise has just released the summary of all U.S. searches conducted for four weeks ending March 27. While we were not surprised that both Google and Bing’s market shares went down, what’s quite surprising is the fact that both Yahoo and Ask.com gained a significant percentage of all the searches. Google search accounted for 69.97%, down from 70.95% in the previous month. Yahoo search increased to 15.04%, up by 3%, Bing search with 9.62% down by -1% and Ask.com’s searches increased by 21% from 2.84% to 3.4%. On a positive note, Google remains to be the greatest source of traffic to key U.S. industries, while Bing saw continued growth among search verticals. Automotive, Business and Finance, Entertainment, News and Media, Shopping and Social Networking categories increased their share of traffic from search engines. Google’s upstream traffic was greater in Automotive, Shopping and Travel Categories. While Yahoo Search was big with the Automotive industry. Bing also enjoyed double-digit growth in the said three industries. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Yahoo Searches Gain 3% of Market

Yahoo Wants to Buy Foursquare for $100 Million

cgseo — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 01:41:11 +0000

Among the location-based social networking startups that are making waves right now, I’ve always believed that Foursquare has the biggest potential to make it big, if it is not that big right now. Foursquare has every good things going for them – increasing usage, new mobile features here and there, and of course prospective buyers including Yahoo. In fact, Yahoo may seem to be the most serious among the Internet players who wants to snag the hot social mobile platform. According to Business Insider Yahoo’s M&A folks are currently deciding whether to buy Foursquare at $100 million or not. While Yahoo has been seriously contemplating on a possible acquisition of Foursquare, the folks at Foursquare on the other hand are also busy talking with other interested buyers such as Apple, Facebook and Twitter. Don’t expect Google to join the fray since Google already has Google Buzz and Google Maps which offer the same service as Foursquare. What’s interesting though if indeed Foursquare wants to sell out is that it may be too early in the game. And besides, some VCs are currently competing on the right to fund Foursquare, at a high valuation of around $80 million. What do you think? Is this just another case of start up creating some noise to up the company’s valuation? Or is it really time for Foursquare to sell out? Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Yahoo Wants to Buy Foursquare for $100

Is Your Site Under Google Penalty?

cgseo — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 14:00:46 +0000

One of the most important aspects of taking care of a site’s search ‘appropriateness’ is knowing what can get you penalized by Google (or any other search engine for that matter). Knowing how to assess the situation correctly so that you can tell if you have just been served a penalty can help you significantly to get the site back at the top for your search terms. Unfortunately, it’s a sure thing that Google is not going to publish the criteria it uses for deciding who gets penalized. So we have to make an educated guess. In the SEO community, our opinions come from spending a lot of time–in some cases years–observing what does, and doesn’t get good results. As with just about any other aspect of SEO, most of what I’m about to say here will be met with cyber-cries of ‘but I disagree,’ or ‘I can prove otherwise,’ pr even expletives! That’s the nature of what we do–there’s always a lot of room for disagreement. If you have been following SEO best-practices closely for some time, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll fall foul of the search engines to the degree that you get penalized. But sometimes as SEO warriors, we inherit a bad situation that someone else has created, and it’s not always obvious at first glance. Google Sandbox or

2 More Alternative Uses of Twitter Favorites You’ve Never Known About

cgseo — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:16:31 +0000

It is always fun to discover new and new possibilities of well-known tools. I already shared one tip on how Twitter favorites may help you better understand what your friends like and build closer relations with them. This week I am sharing two more interesting uses of Twitter favorites: Subscribe to Your (or Anyone’s) Friends’

How Much Traffic Does Bing Refer to Your Site?

cgseo — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 12:19:03 +0000

I was going through our Analytics last night on SEJ and looking into our referrals from Bing, and thought I would share with our readers. Over the last 30 days, Bing referrals account for 3.14% of the organic search traffic to Search Engine Journal. Looking at the top 3 referring search engines, Bing did top Yahoo for referrals to SEJ : Google 91.46% Bing 3.14% Yahoo 3.09% That may seem like a rather large difference and your first reaction may be something like “Bing traffic is not so great” but looking at our top traffic referrers for the past 30 days, and Bing is topping a lot of major websites and networks. google feedburner bing yahoo twitter.com facebook.com sphinn.com ask.com network stumbleupon.com aol douban.com mediapost.com readwriteweb.com reddit.com en.wikipedia.org delicious.com twitterfeed hootsuite.com I do not think that this list is 100% correct however, since Google Analytics has such a difficult time consolidating all Twitter referrals into one metric. I think the Twitter driven traffic to SEJ does trump Bing & Yahoo. To track this better, we’ll be adding a new widget from BLVDstatus this week to better measure Twitter and socially driven traffic to SEJ. So, what’s your Bing traffic look like? Feel free to share in the comments below. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . How Much Traffic Does Bing Refer to Your

When SEO Is Not Really SEO

cgseo — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 13:56:30 +0000

Okay so this article isn’t an SEO tutorial. It’s not a rant against the fine people at Google Labs. It’s not even a rant so much as a question I pose to you, Search Engine Journal’s readers. Okay – maybe I’ll rant just a little. because that’s part of my voice. Oh fine. Enough of you know me by now that this is really going to be a full blown rant. And a question. What can I say? The topic for this article didn’t just pop into my head one day. It’s been boiling and roiling and fuming and fermenting for a long time. So what topic could possibly get me so completely ripped apart that I’d want to scream at the top of my lungs? How about…. Wait for it…. Pretend SEO If you think you know what I’m talking about, read on. You may be surprised. Pretend SEO, to me, can mean many things. But in this instance, what I’m talking about is situations where you’re called upon to perform your magic on a site. And that site happens to clearly need hours upon hours of optimization work. Because it’s in a highly competitive field. Where the top players have been entrenched since forever. Or they have hundreds or thousands of pages. And the site you’re charged with has maybe 30 words of real content total. Spread across five pages. And two back-links. From the site owner’s sister’s quilting site, and her cousin’s eBay page – you know the one – where there hasn’t been any products available since he sold that old moldy couch for $8. So you take one look at the site and you know it’s going to take a lot of work. Except you’re told “You’ve got three hours. Do what you can.” Or you’re dealing with a complex site – that’s got thirty seven categories of services the company offers. Saturating 65,000 pages. And 987,355 inbound links. Yet, for some reason, with all that depth, the site’s no higher than the 10th page of the SERPs. And you know in THIS case, it’s going to take a full blown audit to figure out this mess. Except you’re told “Just come up with a quick one-page plan that outlines what you’ll do to optimize the site over the next six months. And oh – you’ve got ten hours a month allotted.” No More Hair Left To Rip Out Some of you may not have ever been in this situation. That’s okay. I’m happy for you. Really. But not really. Because I’m jealous. That you don’t know the heartache. Yet. But you just wait. If you stick around this industry long enough, and diversify your income stream throughout your illustrious SEO career, you WILL Know this evil of which I speak. Trust me. You will. For those of you who know what I’m talking about, because you too, have been in either of these painful situations, I ask you – at what point do you say “This is not SEO. I can’t consciously expend the time you’ve allotted and claim that it’s significant enough to truly be called optimization.” The “It’s Better Than No SEO” Argument. Countless times I’ve heard that same account manager / employer / client spit out those immortal words. The concept being that surely, with all my years of experience, and all the miracles of SEO I’ve pulled off in the past, that even with a few minutes being all that’s allocated, I can get some stupid small number of phrases into the site in a way that those phrases will show up on the first page of Google, or Yahoo or Bing. And thus, “It’s better than no SEO at all”. But is it? How much optimization needs to be performed to truly qualify as genuine optimization? And at what point, if you fall short of that threshold, do you call it a sham? An illusion? A scam? A delusion? I’ve had to ask myself these questions countless times, since I provide consulting services to agencies. And they’re forever compromising. Sometimes it’s because the clients they take on have very serious budgetary constraints. And I can understand that. I don’t LIKE it. Yet I understand it. Because it’s the nature of business. Yet there’s just some situations where I say it’s too much insanity. And I even occasionally refuse to work on a site because of that. Like just this past week. I refused to work on a site, let alone have my name be associated with it. That’s how delusional I felt the scenario was. What About You? When do you draw the line? Do you even have the LUXURY of drawing that line? When do you cave in and go along for the pretend optimization pony ride? Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . When SEO Is Not Really

Yahoo Buys Social Sport Site Citizen’s Sports

cgseo — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 01:33:23 +0000

Yahoo is beefing up its Sports content site as it acquires social sport startup Citizen’s Sports . In case you’re not aware, Citizen’s Sports are responsible for the popular Fantasy Sports Game in Facebook. By acquiring Citizen’s Sports, Yahoo hopes to strenghten its social strategy of enriching, aggregating and distributing social content from across the web while offering social experience especially since Citizen’s Sports has proven itself in the social sports industry with its innovative applications. In fact millions of people are said to using Citizen’s Sports various social and mobile products including fantasy sports, live scores and up-to-the minutes sports news. These will blend will with Yahoo Sports content to create a seamless experience for all of us sports fans. Yahoo Sports boasts of more than 39 million monthly unique users in the U.S. While Citizen’s Sports popular applications that work with Facebook, MySpace, hi5, iPhone and Android span across professional, college and high school sports. These two sports services are definitely a match-made-in heaven. The acquisition deal is set to commence in the second quarter 0f 2010. Unfortunately no finacial details were disclosed yet. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Yahoo Buys Social Sport Site Citizen’s